The covenant and the courts: Inside a Christian university's law school crusade

LANGLEY, B.C., and OTTAWA — On a soaking Wednesday evening last fall, about 45 minutes east of Vancouver, 40 student teachers gathered for a formal debate on SOGI 123, a controversial sexual orientation and gender identity curriculum proposed for British Columbia.

The topic was the students’ choice, says professor Allyson Jule — a practical one, perhaps, since some of them might soon face arguments for and against it at parent-teacher nights. And whatever their personal beliefs, the students behaved like … well, like teachers, applauding each parry and thrust of the debate with wholesome encouragement.

The students assigned to the No side repudiated the most extreme positions expressed in the province in recent months: that homosexuality is a choice, as a Langley parent suggested at a school district meeting in June; or that tolerating children’s alternative gender expressions amounts to abuse, as a Chilliwack school trustee complained in October (later apologizing).

Instead, they appealed to the value of ideological diversity over “indoctrination,” and to teachers’ professional expertise and judgment in leading their classrooms.

The Yes side countered that SOGI 123 does, in fact, rely on teachers’ expertise to craft lesson plans appropriate to their classes. And they made arguments familiar to anyone following the sex-ed wars: that high rates of bullying reported by LGBTQ youth, both unacceptable on their face and bad for educational outcomes, have been improved by such curricula.

In theory, this could have been any university debate. But these were teachers in training at Trinity Western University, so the Yes side also appealed directly to what makes the school special — or problematic, if you prefer.

“The Bible calls for us to care for the marginalized, and for those who are unable to look out for themselves,” they argued. “And while we are not saying (you should) throw your theological beliefs out the window, our public education system needs to reflect the culture that it is in.”

Students here are well aware, however, that balancing private faith and public work is no simple matter.

When Trinity, a private evangelical Christian institution, first proposed a faculty of education in 2000, the B.C. College of Teachers rejected its application: It argued that the university’s community covenant, which prohibits “sexual intimacy” outside of marriage between a man and a woman, impugned graduates’ qualifications to teach in the real world.

The following year the Supreme Court overturned that decision. Trinity’s faculty of education has since graduated more than 400 teachers.

Nonetheless, the community covenant is once again a matter for the country’s top judges — this time because of the university’s proposed law program. The law societies of both B.C. and Ontario have refused to accredit any future grads, arguing that Trinity’s governing values are in direct conflict with the Charter of Rights that lawyers are expected to uphold.

Final arguments were made in Ottawa late last year, and a ruling is expected in late spring or early summer. Whether an education degree is fundamentally different from a law degree, and a college of teachers from a law society, is a key disagreement between TWU (which says it isn’t) and its opponents (which mostly say it is).

But the Supreme Court’s decision could have ramifications far beyond Trinity. The law societies’ objections are of a piece with the federal Liberal government’s insistence that groups receiving summer job funding support the Charter of Rights, including a supposed right to abortion on demand.

“The very nature of religion in public life” is at stake, says Ray Pennings, executive vice-president of the Christian think tank Cardus — whether it’s “something totally personal (and) private,” or something that has at least some entrée into the “public space.” A ruling against Trinity would have “consequences for everyone in society,” he argues.

If a privately funded university can run afoul of the Charter, for one thing, what does that mean for publicly funded religious schools? Canadians of all faiths, and none, routinely receive care from government-funded religious hospitals and social service agencies. Is that now up for debate?

There was a certain irony in seeing the debate on SOGI 123 at Trinity, a university that’s often depicted as tolerating only one view of society. I suspect there are modern, supposedly freer-thinking Canadian campuses where such a discussion could never happen, the Yes side being so monolithically supported.

But it’s not clear how much weight the reality of campus life at Trinity, as opposed to its official policies and popular perception, will carry as the courts consider its future ambitions.

Trinity Western was founded as a two-year junior college in 1962 by the Canadian and American arms of the Evangelical Free Church, on what had been a 115-acre dairy farm. Fifty-six years later it offers all manner of undergraduate and graduate degrees, including nursing and education — provincially self-regulated professions, just like the law.

Like any public Canadian university it is also a registered charity, and its professors compete for public research funding. Under the previous federal government, Trinity received $2.6 million from a $2-billion infrastructure fund dedicated to universities.

But unlike Canada’s best-known universities, Trinity is otherwise entirely privately funded — the largest such school in Canada and the most expensive university in the country according to Universities Canada. Trinity pegs undergrad tuition at an eye-watering $22,840 per annum.

On campus, Trinity presents like most Canadian universities — drab older buildings mixed with newer ones, which share a West Coast wood-and-glass aesthetic — but in miniature. There are only 1,900 undergraduate students, and only 900 live on campus. Officially, the average class size is 20. Pretty much everyone knows pretty much everyone else.

That’s what those who like Trinity like about it, and in spring sunshine, I was plausibly assured, it is a beautifully peaceful place to study: imagine eating lunch on a verdant green lawn surrounded by cherry blossoms and soaring pine trees. I assume there are mountain views. Alas, during my visit, the rain only abated for the torrential downpours.

Trinity is certainly not the only private Canadian Christian university that’s sending graduates into regulated professions. Others granting bachelors of education include Crandall University in Moncton; Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ont.; Tyndale University College in Toronto; The King’s University in Edmonton; and Ambrose University in Calgary.

Redeemer’s student code of conduct identifies “sexual intimacies which occur outside of a heterosexual marriage” as an “unacceptable practice.” Tyndale’s “community life and standards” policy obliges students to “follow the biblical teaching that such a marriage is the exclusive context for sexual intimacy.” Ambrose cites the Apostle Paul’s epistle to the Galatians: “Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh” — “sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery,” for example, plus “drunkenness, orgies, and the like.”

Most Trinity supporters say the 2001 Supreme Court decision on Trinity’s teacher’s college ought to be slam-dunk precedent in the law school’s favour. But at the Supreme Court, several of the intervenors against Trinity made the case that the legal profession, unlike education or nursing, is “special” — because lawyers are charged with upholding the very freedoms that Trinity is ostensibly violating with its covenant (never mind that Trinity believes its religious freedoms are threatened in exactly the same way).

One of those intervenors is the Canadian Civil Liberties Association — which supported Trinity in its fight to establish a teachers college. The facts are different this time, argued spokesperson Noa Mendelsohn Aviv in an interview in December. Trinity is seeking a prestigious reward from an arm of government in the form of law society accreditation, she says, and “the moment that institution says, ‘Give us a significant public benefit,’ it cannot in the same breath say, ‘We are a closed religious group.’”

TWU looks like most campuses, in miniature. The school has 1,900 undergrads, and only 900 live on campus. (Trinity Western University handout)

Still, if Trinity would be both Canada’s first private law school and its first Christian law school, neither idea should be remotely novel to Canadian jurists. U.S. News and World Report ranks (Catholic) Notre Dame’s law school 20th in the nation, (Mormon) Brigham Young’s 46th, (Baptist) Baylor’s 51st and (Churches of Christ) Pepperdine’s 65th. All of those universities make it clear to students that sexual conduct is a matter for married men and women, please and thank you.

No one seems seriously to think those universities are turning out lawyers who don’t understand civil rights. Indeed, graduates of these schools have a well-established path to the Canadian bar — a series of courses and examinations — should they decide to practice here.

“Nobody questions your faith” during that process, observes Earl Phillips, executive director of Trinity’s law school. “Nobody questions the school that you came from, except for the purposes of assessing the quality of the legal education you got. And nobody asks about the community covenant you studied under at that law school.”

Graduates of Trinity Law, were it (very hypothetically) to open tomorrow, would have no such path. And it’s not as if thwarting Trinity’s ambitions would weed out evangelical Christian lawyers. Abbotsford lawyer Jessie Legaree holds two degrees from Trinity Western and a J.D. from the University of Toronto — though she says she would have considered TWU Law had it existed.

“There is little distinction between me and future Trinity Western graduates, she wrote in a National Post op-ed. “Despite attending law school in the public system, I have not been ‘born again’ in the secularist image. My faith remains at the core of my identity and will continue to impact my personal governance as well as how I interact with the world.”

Many of Trinity Law’s opponents argue that granting it accreditation would simply be an affront to LGBTQ Canadians’ collective and individual dignity — and the Ontario Court of Appeal unanimously agreed. “The part of TWU’s community covenant in issue … is deeply discriminatory to the LGBTQ community, and it hurts,” wrote Justice James MacPherson. The law societies argue granting Trinity accreditation would discriminate against LGBTQ students who want to go to law school: the overall pot of spaces would have increased, but they would not all be available on a non-discriminatory basis

Trinity and its supporters argue that the Charter also protects it and other religious communities — including potential TWU law students — from discrimination. When rights come into conflict, TWU lawyer Robert Staley noted at Supreme Court hearings, precedent dictates that judges must attempt to balance them — not pick a winner and a loser. That’s what happened in the 2001 ruling for Trinity’s faculty of education. And “in the time that’s elapsed,” he argued, “the balancing process has not tipped such that what was acceptable then is no longer acceptable now.”

But it has, Justice Rosalie Abella interjected (perhaps tellingly). “We have since then put a Charter blanket around same-sex marriage.”

Justice Richard Wagner went further: What should the court do if a prospective law school banned interracial marriage?

The analogy came up several times during the Supreme Court hearings. But if it held then so would an analogy that millions of Canadians attend churches, mosques and synagogues whose marriage policies are morally equivalent to banning mixed-race marriages. It’s not an impossible argument to make, but it sure isn’t mainstream. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was married in just such a church. And in its 2004 reference on same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court made clear that religious definitions of matrimony were not in any way under threat.

After so many years of debate, members of the tight-knit Trinity Western community are used to hearing arguments that bear little relationship to their daily lives.

“Academic staff are required to teach students that the Bible is the ultimate, final, and authoritative guide by which ethical decisions are to be made,” Elaine Craig, a Dalhousie University law professor who is widely cited among those opposed to accreditation, wrote in a 2013 paper.

“This compulsory ideological conformity effectively excludes students on the basis of their sexual orientation or marital status,” the United Church of Canada argued in its factum to the Supreme Court. “It is also demeaning and degrading of these individuals, explicitly characterizing them as immoral outcasts, who are worthy of being shunned, or excluded by being pitied.”

“The Covenant is a binding contract. It governs conduct both on and off campus,” intervenors Start Proud and Outlaws intoned in their factum.

But as anyone who has signed a code of conduct or even scanned a list of institutional policies knows, rules are rarely followed to the letter, and recriminations are anything but guaranteed. It is just so at Trinity. Last year the campus newspaper, Mars’ Hill, conducted a survey of covenant compliance. While unscientific, the results were nevertheless revealing: 28 per cent of respondents said they had used marijuana or other non-medical drugs; 55 per cent admitted to drinking to excess; 32 per cent admitted to sex outside marriage; four per cent admitted to having an abortion.

There are also LGBTQ students at Trinity, as media have reported. Yet the suggestion they might feel welcome despite the covenant “defies logic,” Craig argued in another paper in 2014. “Not only are prospective students required … not to engage in same-sex sexual intimacy under any circumstances, but they are also required to police each other for any breaches of this promise.” (The covenant says it “may at times” be necessary for students “to hold one another accountable,” as most honour codes do.)

Lawyers are naturally going to argue from written policies. But such sweeping statements are simply irreconcilable with the observable reality on campus. And that gets up a lot of noses in the Trinity Western community, including those who would very much like the university to change.

Trinity was first founded as a two-year college on a dairy farm. Today there are all manner of degree options, including education and nursing.(Ben Nelms for National Post)

There is no shortage of such people: In a recent open letter to the community bearing 287 signatures, an LGBTQ-affirming group of Trinity students, faculty and staff, alumni and parents called OneTWU argued “that homophobia and transphobia are affronts to our Creator God,” and that “reconciliation and healing is needed to bridge the gap between the Christian church and the LGBTQ+ community at large.”

Two hundred and eighty-seven signatures is a fair haul in such a small community. And the letter’s language reflects conflicted attitudes about the prospective law school: some strongly believe in Trinity’s right to hold its religious views, even while teaching law, but are also weary of the endless battle and the toll it takes on students.

Bryan Sandberg, who graduated in 2014 and has spoken before about his mostly positive experiences as a gay student at Trinity, says that most in the community are “not rampaging bigots” — “they’re just people” — but the community covenant “explicitly creates this space where homophobia is allowed to exist, where LGBTQ people are viewed as lesser.”

In a word, he says, it is “uncomfortable.”

“These are people who are growing up in churches, who are born into Christian families, and there’s nothing they can do about that. Their faith becomes an extremely important part of who they are,” Cam Thiessen, a graduate student in biblical studies who signed the OneTWU letter as an “ally,” says of Trinity students. Coming to grips with their sexuality in such an environment can obviously be terribly difficult.

“This could have been an opportunity for Trinity to begin making steps toward a more ecumenical approach to this issue — recognizing that there are Christians who are affirming of LGBTQ people and there are entire denominations that are very affirming,” including some evangelical groups, he argues.

“Instead it’s a ton of money and a ton of time going towards fighting for the right to exercise some sort of authority over this group of people” — time and money that Thiessen wishes could go toward “hiring more faculty, or bringing in more guest speakers, or bringing in better resources for people in the LGBTQ community to understand what their place is in this type of religious society.”

In the meantime, however, many students say Trinity is a far more welcoming, tolerant and diverse campus than outsiders realize. Many, including LGTBQ community members and their allies, believe a place they love and where they have felt loved has been unfairly caricatured.

I wasn’t surprised to find open minds at Trinity Western, but Thiessen’s was a bit more open than what I expected in the faculty of biblical studies.

He has come a long way from what he describes as a typical Mennonite upbringing in Calgary mega-churches: “I would identify as an ex-evangelical,” he says. He currently attends a church where the priest is both gay and married. And he says most biblical arguments against homosexuality stem from “a shallow understanding of how scripture works.”

I also met Haya Fadda, a Jordanian Muslim studying linguistics at Trinity. She says she chose it over much larger, more urban and secular universities where she was accepted, including Reading, Glasgow and Edinburgh (ranked third in the most recent QS World University Rankings for linguistics), because of its “holistic approach”: small classes, personal contact with professors and a fascinating institutional mission to translate the Bible into new languages — “languages with 200 speakers in a remote place (that are) undocumented and unwritten,” as Fadda puts it.

“That gives it a more applied feel,” she says, “So you’re not just sitting in a classroom taking on theories.”

Fadda adds that although she isn’t Christian, she is among many on campus who enjoy the daily chapel meeting at 11a.m., when everything else shuts down for song, speeches and prayer. “What’s great about Trinity is the community life,” she says. “So going to chapel, connecting with other people, we talk about different things, they affirm your faith — whatever (it is). Because I believe that at the end of the day we’re praying to the same God.”

Sandberg, whose experience coming out to his missionary parents in the Philippines at age 15 was so traumatic he was left suicidal, was also looking for community — specifically, perhaps ironically, “a Christian school where I wasn’t going to get kicked out (for being gay).” Trinity, unlike some American colleges he was considering, fit the bill.

Once at Trinity, he began telling his story — with what he describes as revelatory results. “I had people crying. One of my best friends at Trinity … told me (I was) the first gay Christian he had ever met, and that because of that it helped him to change his viewpoint on homosexuality. I’ve had a lot of those kind of conversations.”

Sandberg came out to his dorm-mates a month into his first semester, by reading a 17-page statement. The first person to speak once he finished was another freshman, a hockey player. “And the first thing he said was, ‘Bryan what can we do as a dorm to make you feel more accepted?’”

Sandberg then came out in Mars’ Hill, the student newspaper — a bold move by any measure. He says he heard second-hand reports of disapproving whispers, but nothing negative to his face, and plenty of affirmation as well.

Trinity president Bob Kuhn says the covenant is a ‘restorative’ document, not a punitive one. (Ben Nelms for National Post)

Ben Kanda, a second-year psychology student who identified as gay in signing the OneTWU letter, sounds utilitarian when discussing his sexual orientation. Being gay isn’t the be-all and end-all of his identity, he says. He’s at Trinity to get an excellent education under terms he’s freely accepted, even if they aren’t perfect. And while he won’t hide his sexual identity, he says it’s not something he’s interested in parading around campus.

“The way that religion can be pushed down people’s throats is the way that LGBTQ issues can be pushed down people’s throats,” he argues. “And I think we need to recognize as a group that if we’re upset with the religious movement pushing their values, we have to be cognizant that we’re also pushing values.”

“Christianity to me is much more about my relationship with Jesus Christ and how I believe he is working through me and in me,” says Kanda. The community covenant’s principles might not quite align with his, but he says “I haven’t felt any persecution whatsoever.”

Professor Jule, who is both the dean of the faculty of education and co-chair of Trinity’s gender studies institute, says she was surprised when she came to the school by how much “room” there was on campus to discuss Christianity’s conflicts with other communities, including Indigenous and LGBTQ Canadians.

Views on campus range from “conservative to very progressive on social issues,” she says, but the board of governors welcomed her proposal to create the gender studies program with open arms. And while she was “curious” about how the program would be received by colleagues at secular universities, she says the reception has ultimately been warm.

“I think my presence (at gender studies events) did debunk some expectation,” says Jule, who is the current president of Canada’s Women’s and Gender Studies et Recherches Féministes.

As she tells her students, feminism was originally a “Christian idea.” It was on “the basis of Christian thought” that 19th-century suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton “pushed forward the notion that women were created equal.” Today, she adds, “there’s Muslim feminism, there’s Christian feminism, there’s Jewish feminism, and they all have a role to play in the discussion.”

Trinity officials, including president Bob Kuhn, claim no one has ever been expelled from the university for a covenant violation related to homosexuality, and he scoffs at the idea that students are expected to snitch on each other. The covenant is a “restorative” document, he insists, not a punitive one.

But there is no question Trinity has caused real harm to real people over their sexuality, deliberately or otherwise. In 2006, Ashlee Davison, a star on Trinity’s championship-winning soccer team, was temporarily banned from the field, had her scholarship stripped and was put on probation when the university found evidence she was in a relationship with another woman.

“I was allowed back on the team, but it was a much different experience this time around. I felt like I was being watched,” she told the Vancouver Sun in 2016.

In the same article, alumnus Megan Jespersen described a tortuous coming to grips with her homosexuality as a 20-year-old Christian who fell in love with a fellow student at Trinity — an inherently difficult process exacerbated by a campus with no obvious source of connection, affirmation and community for people in her position.

“By approximately probably half way through my bachelor’s degree I had arrived a place where I hated the love that I felt,” she told the Sun. “I tried as much as I could to pray my gay away, and that didn’t work because that wasn’t truth and that’s not how I’m meant to live on this earth.”

Anecdotal evidence suggests that university counsellors have offered students struggling with their sexuality something more like advice on how to suppress their feelings and come back closer to God. Worse, the Sun reported, “someone from the school eventually outed (Jespersen) to her family, long before she was ready.” (Kuhn insists all students seeking help will receive compassion, first and foremost.)

Speakers invited to chapel have occasionally sparked controversy: In 2015 there was Regent University psychologist Mark Yarhouse, who has argued that “sexual orientation may be changeable for some, and that the attempt to change sexual orientation is not harmful on average”; the year before there was Christopher Yuan, who tells audiences that at rock bottom in his life he realized he had to “either reject God and pursue gay relationships … or abandon gay relationships by liberating myself from my sexuality, and live as a follower of Christ.”

Some students, including Thiessen, say certain professors are well known to provide hostile environments for LGBTQ students. OneTWU posters on campus announcing the presence of LGBTQ people within the Trinity community — “We went here too,” they read — have on occasion wound up in the trash. And the Trinity Matchmaker, a theoretically all-in-good-fun jape that anonymously publishes students’ ideas of good partners for their classmates, went rapidly downhill last year when Thiessen offered a partially tongue-in-cheek Facebook comment that it was all quite “heteronormative.”

Before long, the Trinity Matchmaker account on Facebook was citing Leviticus 20:13: “’If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”

Matthew Brouwer — a fourth-year business student who is talking with his boyfriend about getting married — says he felt some “general nervousness” around his sexual identity at Trinity, though never any “outright” homophobia. But he was nevertheless taken aback by the thought that he would be walking around Trinity’s small, leafy, otherwise thoroughly welcoming, campus with whomever was manning the Trinity Matchmaker account.

It’s difficult, of course, to measure authoritatively what it’s like for LGBTQ students on campus, because the most vulnerable aren’t out there talking. The students who spoke to me are by definition part of a relatively confident, self-selected group, as is everyone who signed the OneTWU letter. But Jespersen, a signatory who graduated in 2005 and now practices as a registered counsellor in Vancouver, says she’s far more interested in understanding than recriminations or sanctions.

“This isn’t the LGBTQ community against Trinity, right? We are them, and they are us, and they are our siblings and our best friends and in some cases our parents who went there,” she says, with obvious passion. “So that letter is (to say) ‘We are here, we went to Trinity as well, we still go to Trinity, and we want Trinity’s covenant to reflect the diversity and the love that we know exists within the community.’”

The week before Trinity’s appearance at the Supreme Court, hundreds of students packed the Trinity Western gym for the 11 a.m. daily chapel service.

Attendance is strongly encouraged but by no means mandatory, students say. And as a very talented five-piece band played Holy (Jesus You Are), a Christian power-ballad, reactions varied: some students paid more attention to their phones, while others evinced a reverence ranging from eyes-closed contemplation to arms-raised ecstasy.

On this occasion, university president Kuhn gave a speech on discouragement and how to overcome it, framed around segments of Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go. “And will you succeed? Yes! You will, indeed!” he read. “(98 and 3/4 per cent guaranteed.)”

The emcee then invited students to surround Kuhn in a prayer circle, and announced plans for a 48-hour vigil to be held during the Supreme Court session. It seems unlikely it will hold much sway as the Supreme Court deliberates — but I suppose it couldn’t hurt.

Kuhn announced this week he would not seek another term as president, according to multiple sources. That would see him depart in roughly a year’s time. He and other Trinity officials and community members seem assured their religious freedoms will prevail. Legaree, the Trinity grad who wrote about the law school in this paper, tells me she is “confident” the Supreme Court will uphold its 2001 decision regarding the faculty of education. “There needs to be space in Canada for one faith-based law school,” she says.

Many in the legal community seem equally confident the very idea is untenable — an interesting development in and of itself. The Supreme Court has never elevated gay rights above religious rights. It hasn’t even been 20 years since it explicitly declined to do so in reference to Trinity’s education faculty.

The daily chapel service is strongly encouraged, say students, but not mandatory. (Ben Nelms for National Post)

“Law professors today really see law as an instrument of the state, and very much an instrument to produce the kind of just society that they want to see achieved — which is in many ways a laudable goal,” says Mary Anne Waldron, a law professor at University of Victoria and a rare pro-Trinity voice in the legal academy. “Except unfortunately sometimes that requires repressing other people’s rights as well.”

“I’m part of the Canadian equality community of legal scholars. That community worked very hard for the key Section 15 equality decisions, and those decisions brought important advancements for women’s rights and the rights of sexual minorities,” says Faisal Bhabha, a law professor at Osgoode Hall. But there’s a sense now that “these rich, American-inspired, right-wing forces are trying to co-opt or appropriate the Charter — and for many on the legal left, the Charter is itself a religious document.”

His colleagues tend not to appreciate it when he likens the law societies’ approach to Kellie Leitch’s much-reviled idea of testing immigrants for “Canadian values” — a comparison that has frequently been made with respect to the federal government’s summer jobs program controversy, as well.

There are also potential benefits to a Christian law school, as University of Saskatchewan law professor Dwight Newman argued in a 2013 article in Constitutional Forum: expanding the profession’s appeal, for example; “the possibility of new forms of legal scholarship”; and “a distinctive values-based engagement with legal thought that is often sorely lacking.”

Trinity plans to focus its law school on charities law, access to representation for poor Canadians and other pressing social justice causes. “We will emphasize things that are emphasized through Trinity Western’s other programs, and the key one is public service,” says Phillips, the executive director of the law school.

It takes a very jaded view of religion, or Christianity, or evangelical Christianity specifically, to assume the university’s stated ambitions are disingenuous. Two-thirds of Canadians say they believe in God, according to a 2015 Angus Reid poll. Just over half say they believe God is “active in this world.” If the fate of Trinity Western Law were up to a nationwide plebiscite, it might be home free.

But Kuhn suggests “there is a general misunderstanding of religious and perhaps especially evangelical Christian positions” — a spurious conflation between Trinity’s views and those of “groups that would be characterized as fundamentalist,” as he puts it.

As it stands, the Trinity community must hope at least five of nine Supreme Court justices are not labouring under such misunderstandings.

The covenant and the courts: Inside a Christian university's law school crusade

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